SITUATION

After one hell of a ride, we've all arrived at the release of Arma 3 Apex and the corresponding free 1.62 platform update. Here's our official launch trailer to celebrate this major milestone! We hope you're already enjoying the vanilla expansion or one of the many custom mod(e)s that were updated in unison. More than ever before we witnessed an impressive pre-release effort by the various mod teams and server hosts to make the transition as smooth as possible. Our thanks go to everyone who has contributed to this release, not least of which our developers and Bohemia Interactive's supporting departments. Have fun running your jungle ops on Tanoa or however else you enjoy playing the game!

What does this mean for Arma 3 support going forward? We'll begin by keeping a very close eye on your reports to Feedback Tracker, the forums and various other channels. The team is already doing triage of issues and they are on top of fixes, tweaks and some of the recently postponed features. Based on the urgency of potential issues, we'll determine our update schedule. In any case, you can expect normal main branch maintenance updates to continue on their 4 to 6 week cycle. They should be rather less impactful than recent feature-rich updates, and rather focus on fixes, mod support, documentation and similar work. Daily Dev-Branch updates are also set to continue. Meanwhile, we're planning our further support for Arma 3. It's a little early now, but we hope to discuss the post-Apex road map over the coming months.

INTELLIGENCE

A few bits of Intel on yesterday's release may have slipped by you, so let's highlight them:

We've added a significant amount of additional official servers for various bits of playable content, including the Apex Protocol campaign of course! Find them via our web-listing, or the Launcher and in-game server browsers.

The "Arma 3 Apex" controls preset is now default (you may have seen the prompt in-game) - give it a go! The legacy "Arma 3" preset is still available as well.

If you own a Digital Deluxe Edition or another applicable special edition, you should have the Apex Official Sound Track in the Bonus\Soundtrack folder of your installation. It contains MP3 and FLAC mastered versions of the tracks that are also present in the game itself. One way of playing the tracks is by using Steam client's own music player (View > Music Player).

Bonus: the Japanese and Korean translations are now available in the standard international distribution!

The old 2D Editor is now indeed considered to be deprecated. It can still be accessed via Ctrl + O(ld) from terrain selection, but is unsupported from now onward.

Have a look at this video interview by PC Gamer with Creative Brit Jay Crowe. It should give you another good bit of insight into the Arma 3 Apex expansion, its goals and what it brings to players.

OPERATIONS

Owners of Apex can now also try out the new 1-4 player co-op campaign: Apex Protocol. Since its staging ahead of release, we have been reading your feedback, positive and negative alike, and taken it to heart. Some aspects received useful tweaks ahead of release, while others may still be addressed post-release. We are for example wanting to adjust the Revive bleed-out timings, so you'll have a better chance of saving your team mates. There's been debate on whether the campaign is suitable for individuals. While you certainly can play it alone, this campaign was indeed designed with a co-op focus. Senior Designer Thomas Ryan has gone over some of the design processes on the forums. Do try playing the missions with friends or even random players via Quick Play. And take your time to explore Tanoa a little. This was the first official content build entirely in Eden Editor. Its power has resulted in some cool compositions and scenes to happen upon. Also try playing the missions multiple times; Arma's inherent sandbox nature may throw some unexpected differences your way. Oh, and there's a set of new Steam achievements to challenge yourselves with!

Going back to our goals for Apex, we made the decision early on to focus its playable content on multiplayer. Based on that we wanted to deliver a military PvE co-op experience for more Arma 3 players. We love seeing milsim units run operations, craft deep, advanced and dynamic scenarios, and conduct extensive After Action Reports. But there are many players out there who just cannot put in the kind of time this usually demands (nonetheless, we recommend them to try to hook up with a suitable unit for embedded operations). We hope this campaign is another type of multiplayer content that may interest more players in military Arma gameplay. Besides that, a focus on and investment in multiplayer indirectly benefits everyone, regardless of their play style. It has contributed to fixes, optimizations, new systems and more.

LOGISTICS

We've had to reset the Analytics settings for everyone, so please review your wishes in the Launcher options. This was needed because a glitch that was present only on various testing branches (e.g. Dev-Branch) caused them to be disabled for everyone temporarily. We had no means to accurately identify just the group of users whose analytics were disabled by this glitch as opposed to by their choice to opt-out. Since we felt it would be a shame to miss this useful data on an important group of our core users, we implemented this corrective solution. Launcher should alert you to this reset in most cases. We've also tried to make the system more robust by adding more fail-safes and information about when and how your settings were updated.

Some players have reported visual glitches on vegetation after the 1.62 update. They witnessed light blue coloration when model LODs were switching while moving across the terrains. It would appear that a GPU driver re-install or update has fixed this for the players we've been in contact with, so please try that if you are encountering similar glitches. We are also investigating reports from another group of users who are experiencing drastic framerate drops after the update. We don't yet have concrete Intel on this, but would like to hear from you with details. Meanwhile, please try doing Steam local file cache verifications, non-SSD defragmentations, tests without mods, custom memory allocators and checks on shared libraries.